Disturbing Wake-Up Nightmares: True Horror Stories
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I went to college in a historic, mid-sized city in Florida, and at the time, I lived in a duplex, maybe three blocks from campus. The city itself is known to be pretty safe, and I also lived in a pretty decent area, with large, history-bearing homes near me. This all happened about five years ago, a little backstory that will become relevant. The duplex I lived in had a front door that locked, and then both the upstairs and downstairs unit had their own locking doors as well.

I lived downstairs and had two roommates, but this specific night, only one of my roommates was home. We knew the girls that lived upstairs, but only really spoke to them in passing. When they moved in, we emphasized just how important it was for them to keep the main front door locked, and they did a good job of doing so. So me and my roommate were in for the night. Knowing the front door is locked, we sparked up a few joints. At some point, we hear a knock at the front door.

and quickly realized that the girls upstairs had ordered a pizza. Later on, it becomes evident that they never lock the front door after receiving their pizza. So as the night begins to wear on, my roommate and I decide to call it a night. We head to our rooms, and since I had a queen bed, I would often sleep with my phone and laptop next to me. Well, a couple hours after I fall asleep, I wake up to a strange man standing over my bed. As soon as I realize that I'm not dreaming,

I notice that he's quickly moving my phone and computer off of my mattress and attempting to move my comforter. It appears as if he's trying to get into my bed. I start to ask him who he is, what's he doing here, and just generally confused as I was still slightly high from before I went to sleep. The only thing that he said to me, and he said it multiple times, was that he was just trying to get in bed. At this point, I start to panic. My mind obviously goes to the worst.

I was hoping that maybe my roommate had invited some random Tinder guy over, and that he had gone to the wrong room. But the more I questioned him, all he had to say was, "I'm just trying to get in bed. I own pepper spray and a stun gun." But of course, I had left them on a shelf that the guy was standing in front of, so there was no way I would be able to grab them without at least escalating the situation. Realizing that I needed to do something quickly, I blurted, "There are five people who live in this house.

And if you don't get the fuck out now, I'll scream and they'll all be in here within seconds. Now, luckily, that's all that it took to scare him off. I don't know if he had brought something with him or if he stole something from me, but I saw him grab something in the dark before running out of my room. As soon as he left, I popped up, shut the door and locked it. I also tried to find my phone, but to no avail. I quickly realized that between my room and the front door is the bedroom of my roommate that was home.

As scared as I was, I was terrified that the guy had maybe gone into her room, so I grabbed my stun gun and my pocket knife, counted to three, and ripped open my door. I ran straight to my roommate's room, only to find her still fast asleep, and there was no evidence of the guy in her room. I woke her up and told her what happened. She asked me if I was sure that I wasn't dreaming, which then got me to question myself. That is, until I walked out of her room and saw that her front door was wide open.

I went back to my room to search for my phone, and I finally found it, hidden under a pile of clothes across my room from where I had left it. That sent a chill up my spine, as I immediately knew for a fact that someone had been in the house and in my room while I was sleeping. They had been there long enough to hide my phone, which only worsened my suspicions of their intentions. I ran back to my roommate's room, who at that point believed me,

We shut her door and barricaded ourselves in there before calling 911. Within minutes, there were police cars swarming our street and they yelled for us to exit the residence and head towards them. At least a dozen police officers came running in and searched every inch of our apartment. They also woke the upstairs girls up and searched their apartment as well just to ensure that the man had left. The officers then had me write a statement and I gave them a description of the man, although to this day,

I've never heard a single thing about this case. I feel incredibly lucky with the outcome of the situation, but the thought of his intentions still terrifies me, and additionally the fact that he was never caught scares me just as well, as I would hate for anyone to have to go through the pure fear that I did. I'll also add, there's a chance that this man was on drugs, or perhaps mentally ill, and held no bad intentions whatsoever, but because he was never caught, I'll never know, and my mind, well,

That's always going to assume the worst. I'm typing this from the living room of a friend's house. What I'm wanting to share happened no more than an hour or so ago, and I'm still trying to process what I just encountered. Me and my buddies Max and Brock were a group of 22 year old guys. Max and Brock live together in the house that I'm at, whereas I live across town by myself. We went out last night for a little fun.

the kind of fun that involved a bit of a bar crawl, late night tacos, and an Uber ride back to their house. Needless to say, by the time we landed, I wasn't really in the kind of shape to drive myself all the way back home, so after making sure it was cool with the homies, I grabbed a sheet and a pillow from their downstairs closet, something that I've done maybe a dozen times before, and made myself a cozy spot on their couch. Everyone said their goodnights at around 2:30 am, and presumably we all knocked out.

I know I did at least. Fast forward a few hours, I'm in a dead sleep, the kind that's been assisted by a copious amount of alcohol, when I hear the front door click open and shut. From where my head is, the door is no more than 10 feet away, so hearing it make noise in the middle of the night doesn't surprise me. With my eyes still closed, I'm thinking that Brock or Max was taking a step out to smoke or something, but as I crack my eyes ever so slightly,

I'm surprised when I don't see either one of my friends. Rather, a tall, super slender woman in the entryway of the home. I've never seen this lady before. She's wearing a long red or salmon-colored dress and maybe some kind of scarf wrapped around her head. Forgive me, I'm not very good with women's accessories. I'm not sure why, but my default was to pretend that I was still asleep, although as she got within a foot or two of the couch and knelt down right at face level,

I knew that the jig was up. I fully opened my eyes and trained them in on this woman, doing my best to make out her face in the ultra-dim light. That's when she put a hand on my shoulder, almost as if to settle me, and she began asking me questions that I didn't understand. The sentences themselves were in English, but they seemed jumbled and incoherent. She held a set of papers in her hands and kept glancing at them as if she were reading her Yoda-styled questions off of them. I sat up

and asked who she was and why she walked in here uninvited. Her reply was that she was from some research department or something before she asked me for my name. I didn't respond, just kind of looked around searching for any inkling that this wasn't happening. I thought about calling out for my friends, or even just making a dash for one of their rooms, but at this moment I was a bit frozen, not sure if I should be fearing for my safety or not. I reached for my phone to call Max,

and after the most awkward 10-15 seconds of stone cold silence, this woman simply nodded in my direction and said, "I can see that you're not ready. That's okay." Before calmly walking out the door again from where I was still frozen on the couch, I could see her make her way towards the street before turning right and walking out of view. Once she was out of sight, that snapped me back. I rushed to the door to make sure that it was locked tight before finding a seat on the stairs

leading to Max and Brock's rooms. I guess the commotion of me plopping on the stairs was enough to wake them up, because as they stumbled through their doorways, they see me and ask if I'm alright. Still fighting the shock, I just sit there, trying to get my racing heart to calm down. As I explain what had just happened, Max offered that he thought it was weird, but surprisingly seemed unconcerned, and bounced back into his room after only a few moments.

Brock was a bit more empathetic as he sat with me on the steps. He shared in my shock, and he even acknowledged the fact that sometimes Max can be a bit too nonchalant when it comes to locking doors when he's faded. Brock eventually took himself back into his room after patting me on the back and telling me to get some rest. But after this happened, how the fuck am I supposed to go back to sleep? I'm not drunk anymore, and I'm ready to just go home, but I'm also still shaking, so I don't want to be behind the wheel.

I'm back on the couch, but no way am I going to be calm enough to doze off. I find myself here, sharing this story with internet strangers, because I still don't know what just happened. It was as strange as any dream I can remember having, and yet, I'm 100% sure that I wasn't asleep. I don't think that I've ever been this unnerved in my life. And I just want to tell you all, thank you for listening.

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In the year 2006, I was a college student at Arizona State University. I lived in an off-campus apartment on a ground floor, and it was a block off from a major street here in Phoenix called Baseline. That detail might be important for later. In the summer of 2006, Phoenix was plagued by two serial killers. One was a Phoenix shooter who ended up being a team of two guys randomly shooting people, and the other

was a baseline killer, a serial rapist, and murderer. Having two killers on the loose put the entire city on edge, and everyone that I knew was talking about it. There were even articles in Time and Newsweek about the situation. So the fall semester had just started. Now, you may have heard this, but Phoenix is hot in August. It would get so stuffy in my apartment, so I'd pretty much be forced to leave the window cracked a little bit because the morning air is nice.

My blinds provided a little visual cover. Anyway, one morning, a strange sound woke me up from my sleep. It was before the crack of dawn, 4:45 AM, and the sun was just barely beginning to peak up over the horizon. The sound that I heard was of someone lightly tapping on my window, and it seemed intentional. In my tired state, I figured maybe it could be a bird, or some branches, or something trivial like that. Tap, tap,

Tap. Silence. After about 90 seconds of nothing, the tapping returned, and it was absolutely purposeful. I was positive at this point that it was a human producing this noise. In my half-awake state, I thought that it could have been my boyfriend, who always thought that it was cute to try and scare me. I decided I'd be a bit of a brat and make him wait, but I was also getting really angry at the tapping. How dare he try to pull a prank on me while I sleep? This is just like him.

I'm going to give him a piece of my mind about disturbing my sleep like this. Tap, tap, tap. At a certain point through all of this, I got up to get a glass of water, still being in the mindset of wanting to annoy my stupid boyfriend who thought that this would be funny. But that's when I saw some movement through the slit of my blinds. That's when I marched over and yanked the blinds so that I could see. Definitely not my boyfriend out there. I said loudly and emphatically, what the f- That's when the man that was out there

seemed taken aback by my anger, albeit only slightly. The man that I saw crouched outside of my window will forever be with me, or more specifically, his eyes and the feeling they gave me were insanely creepy. Honestly, words just can't do justice to how terrifying those eyes were. They looked like black orbs with no white around them. Absolutely predatory. When I see pictures of Ted Bundy or Charles Manson, that's exactly what he looked like.

Even if you saw a picture of how they looked, it's different when you experience them in person. It totally floored me. Something about this man, even beyond tapping at my window, was profoundly wrong. He was crouched down, almost like a baseball umpire. He had on dark pants, a purple or black shirt, and a dark Nike hat. He was dark-complected, maybe just about entering middle age, but that's just about all I got, given that it was still so dark, after I yelled, what the f*** at him.

He whispers to me, "Can I talk to you?" And if you want to know how insanely creepy that is to hear, just whisper that sentence out loud to yourself right now. It still sends chills down my spine when I think of how it hit my ear. As my brain is making sense of what I just heard, I notice his hands subtly move towards his waist. Now, this is about a three-second interaction at this point, and for some reason, I thought of Ted Bundy and how he'd pretend to be crippled to target his victims.

I thought back to my mom, telling me to not be so nice to strangers and to not be afraid to be a bitch. My thinking wasn't as calculated as all that, but it was more the nanoprocessing of how to deal with this particular situation. So when he whispered what he did, I began yelling at him. "Hell no! Get the fuck out of here, asshole!" I shut the window angrily and locked it.

I can't overemphasize how incredibly irritated I was that this person had the audacity to disturb my precious sleep. I laid back down and wondered if I'd perhaps been too mean, what if that guy needed help, but that didn't really make sense. Why would he be like tapping and whispering if he was truly in trouble? I decided then that he was a creep after all, and I was too annoyed to go back to sleep, but I did my best to lay there and calm myself down.

I told my roommate about this a little later in the morning, and she sort of jokingly asked if it could have been the baseline killer. When she said that, my heart absolutely sank. This man's face looked exactly like it did in those police sketches that were on billboards. The only problem is that those billboards showed that man with dreadlocks, and the man that was at my window had no dreads. Nevertheless, I called the Phoenix Police Department, and the detective that I spoke to

agreed that it did sound like the baseline killer's M.O. The suspect would often say something to throw his targets off, then he'd blitz attack them. The detective said that my angry response probably made me seem too much of a hassle, and then he moved on. The only problem was that I thought that this man looked Hispanic, and the detective said that many witnesses described the killer as being black.

I thought that the cops might want to come out and try for samples or surveillance video or something, but I didn't hear back from the detective. Once my parents learned of this, they properly freaked out. For the household, they got us knives, pepper spray, and put up signs saying that the property was defended by Smith and Wesson. We learned later on that another tenant in the complex had complained the same morning. I never learned all the details.

but this idiot was apparently going around the damn apartments trying his best to find a target. After this all occurred, the property management company wouldn't let us out of our lease, although they did allow for us to move to the second floor apartment right above our old unit. So while we may not have been able to move away, at least we weren't on the ground anymore. Fast forward to September 4th, 2006. The Phoenix Police Department arrests a man named Mark Goodow. He's arrested

on suspicion of being the baseline killer. When I saw his mugshot, I was sick to my stomach, but also relieved, because this was absolutely the man that stood outside my window all those mornings ago. The details that we would learn about his attacks would shake me even further to my core. The fact that he would use disarming questions to get his targets off kilter before blitzing them, subduing them, and ultimately doing what he pleased to them.

He also never had dreadlocks, but he did make it a habit of utilizing wigs when he was out on the hunt after being tried and found guilty for multiple heinous attacks. Mr. Godot now resides on death row in Arizona. In the years after his conviction, his wife tried to mount some campaign to show that the police were framing him or something to that effect. On a personal level, it would certainly make for an interesting coincidence if this poor innocent man who they framed

was also out there whispering like a creep and tapping on my window. Now, think as I might, I can't think of anything more scary than a serial killer tapping on your window before daybreak. That's something that actually happened to me. And if it happens to you, the only thing that I can say is do your best to scare them back. Don't be afraid to be downright rude to someone who's injecting themselves into your space. It could save your life if you're not afraid to throw your weight around and tell someone off.

Trust yourself, you can still be the most kind and generous person in the world while still telling someone to f*** off. At the UPS store, we know being a small business owner means holiday time is still go time. Still get those orders shipped time and still re-up on stamps and supplies time.

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